SAGINAW, MI — Linda Parent remembers Saginaw's Fulton Street as a quiet residential road lined with saplings and newly-constructed homes, each filled with a young family or newlywed couple.

"I remember a lot of neighborhood get-togethers," said Parent, whose parents lived at 3501 Fulton when she was born in 1950. "It was, I think, a newer neighborhood."

Going back to visit the neighborhood on Saginaw's East Side now, Parent struggles to recognize much from her childhood memories.

The house where she grew up is gone. The saplings now tower above her head. The street is empty, and Parent looks around as if she is trying to get her bearings in a strange place.

Years after she left, her house burned twice in fires that were both ruled suspicious — once in June 2003, and again in July 2004. Almost two years after the second fire, the home was demolished with federal grant funds. Now the empty property, bisected by a worn footpath where Parent's house once stood, is owned by the Saginaw County Land Bank.

What happened to Parent's home and the neighborhood on Fulton in general is a microcosm for many Saginaw neighborhoods that lost people and have seen blight and arson take a toll.

Just across East Genesee on Fulton, contractors in October demolished six houses to kick off an effort funded with an $11.2 million federal grant that will result in the elimination of 950 blighted homes in Saginaw. Saginaw officials estimate those homes targeted for demolition amount to about half the nearly 2,000 empty, blighted houses in Saginaw and clustered along the city's borders.

The county's Land Bank, created to process tax foreclosed properties in the best interest of the community, owns about 3,200 properties like the one where Parent's childhood home once stood.

Looking up and down the empty street, Parent said the neighborhood is not the one she remembers from her childhood.

The trees are taller, of course. Some houses have disappeared altogether, while others look much different than they did decades ago.

Two large empty lots across from where Parent's home once stood are strewn with trash and pocked with clusters of high weeds during warm weather.

"It's kind of scary now," she said.

Parent, whose maiden name is Welling, said her parents did not think twice about letting her and her siblings walk a block south to the Saginaw County Fairgrounds or even farther to the original location of Jessie Loomis Elementary School.

"We used to just freely walk there," she said.

Parent fondly remembers cutting through neighboring yards to walk to the Webber Street gate on the northeast corner of the Saginaw County Fairgrounds, which has slowly returned to nature since the fair left for Chesaning more than a decade ago.

"They used to have the big wooden fair buildings there," Parent said. "One year, one caught fire. That was a big neighborhood event, everyone coming over to watch them burn."

Walking along Genesee from Fulton to the fairgrounds, she points out the former site of Sullivan's Fish and Chips, now vacant. Where a drive-through convenience store now stands at East Genesee and Webber, Parent said she remembers going to an ice cream stand there as a young girl.

Her family moved to Bridgeport Township when Parent was 10, she said, not because of the decline of the neighborhood, but because they needed more space.

"They had a two-bedroom home and had a fourth child," she said.

Though her neighborhood is not what it used to be, Parent said she will always remember the good times from her childhood in Saginaw.